Friday, December 08, 2006

AMA President nails P4P for what it is at AMA Interim meeting

Dr. William G. Plested III, president of the AMA had this to say regarding pay for performance at the recent Interim meeeting;

I will point out that-reminiscent of the managed care debachle-P4P will allow insurers to dictate the treatment that we give our patients and will publicly label any physician foolish enough to contract with them and not follow their dictates as nonpreferred, substandard or some such label.

This is not just speculation as the physicians in the state of Washington had exactly that happen to them.

Further, he said that he was unaware of any P4P program in place that was in compliance with the AMA suggested guidelines for P4P.

A proposal was made for the AMA to launch a campaign to discredit P4P and correctly label it as economic credentialing. Unfortunately, no resolution was passed. At least, the president of the AMA recognizes P4P for what it is which much more than can be said for the leadership of the American College of Physicians who seem to be working with the third payers payers to move ahead with this very bad idea. ACP seems to believe-or at least their rhetoric suggests-that they can "work with" third payers to ensure that P4P program will improve quality and not just lower costs.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I was visiting your website and as a retired doctor, I would like to see your thoughts on Medical Tourism as an upcoming trend in the medical field. Please feel free to visit my website and leave a comment. My blog page is http://usmedicaltourism.blogspot.com/

What self-serving BS, retired doctor. . . . every field must face quantification and every wise consumer should realize the limits of any system of performance metrics. What is wrong here is that insurance companies are doing the grading--as if their economic incentives include good healthcare.

Rather,the National Practitioner Data Bank must be made public. Firms would then spring up to comb through the data and provide intelligent, careful analyses.